If you look at the organs of opinion in Britain and Europe, and at the institutions such as universities, in which the self- consciousness of European societies is expressed and developed, you find almost everywhere a culture of repudiation. Take any aspect of the Western inheritance of which our ancestors were proud, and you will find university courses devoted to deconstructing it. Take any positive feature of our political and cultural inheritance, and you will find concerted efforts in both media and the academy to place it in quotation marks, and make it look like an imposture or a deceit. And there is an important segment of political opinion on the left that seeks to endorse these critiques and to convert them into policies.¹

Surely our ancestors did many vile things, but just as surely they did many noble things. The psychology that persistently obsesses over the former and refuses to look at the latter must be some kind of self-hating neurosis. But it’s the way to get an A in “social studies.”